At DTCC, Kaizen empowers every employee to critically examine his or her work life in continuous pursuit of ways to streamline departments and operations. First implemented at DTCC in September 2007, Kaizen is designed to reduce waste – waste of time, waste of resources, and waste of employee talent – in day-to-day activity, and provide a means for continuous improvement to business processes.

At DTCC, we extend the benefit of Kaizen principles to our customers in the form of increased efficiency and cost savings. There are eight primary items Kaizen strives to reduce:

• Excess people motion
• Non value-added processing
• Excess inventory
• Transportation (i.e. movement of files or information)
• Defects
• Waiting
• Manual touches and
• Underutilization of resources

Once a process is identified for improvement, process owners and operators will run a “Kaizen event,” which follow a 10-step process to identify and implement on-the-fly changes to processes and procedures. Participants then study the effects of those changes as they relate to processing time, defects, and the other sources of waste identified by the Kaizen methodology.

In one instance, Kaizen events were successful in streamlining the onboarding process for new clients and existing clients looking to expand their use of DTCC’s Deriv/SERV product offerings. In three afternoons, Deriv/SERV was able to speed up the often-complex onboarding process, and also implemented additional quality control procedures to reduce operational risk. This project, like those that have followed, was successful for many reasons. Kaizen teams are empowered to take ownership and implement changes on the spot, ensuring sustainability, a key component in process change.

Through programs and processes like Kaizen, DTCC has created and maintains a culture that seeks continuous improvement, including every employee in a company-wide drive toward greater efficiency, reduced risk, and reduced costs for customers.